Vancouver Island Nature Tours

It’s not often you find a guest who demonstrates to you how much he and his family enjoyed their trip with Rainbird Excursions. But Micheal Pratt has done just that. He sent all 130 of his photos to me. And some of them are really nice. So I thought I would share them and his [...]

Last Friday I took a drive up to Labour Day Lake. For those who don’t know, Labour Day Lake is a fairly high elevation lake that is the source of the Cameron River, the River that runs through Cathedral Grove on Vancouver Island. I wanted to see how much snow was still around. We had [...]

Recently a friend emailed me a surprising file. It was a PDF file (That’s Adobe Acrobat to some) of an old trail booklet of the Alberni Valley. Greg had kept this booklet, which is really just photocopies of drawn maps and of typed descriptions, for many years. Recently he scanned it and sent it to [...]

Edited: 10 Feb 2009 I have been to the Nahmint Recreation Site a couple of times recently. And many more times in the past. Each time I go I am amazed that the place is so empty. How many places on Vancouver Island can you go and camp or picnic in a pristine old-growth stand [...]

I have been working for two years to get a tour to see the Vancouver Island Marmot going. Primarily, there was resistance from the British Columbia Ministry of Environment (MoE) because these animals are so rare.However we have reached an agreement that they will address government concerns and the tours will go ahead starting in [...]

It’s Good Friday today. This morning I hiked up to the Alberni Lookout. From Coombs Country Candy on Highway 4, it’s only about a 40-50 minute hike, depending on how fast you go. I’ve been hiking up regularly because it is a good bit of exercise. The weather was cool and foggy. But the weatherman [...]

As I have said on the Rainbird web page, there are over a hundred hiking trails in the Alberni Valley of various lengths and difficulty. The trouble is that very few of them are mapped – until now that is.Just recently the Alberni Environmental Coalition published the second edition of a trail guide that gives [...]

I got a thank you message today from a young couple who went to the Cous Creek estuary with me earlier in the month. I guess they just got back home to Florida. They said they really enjoyed the hike and would be glad to give a testimonial. Don’t they look great together? In case [...]